Clonal Reproduction in Fungi COLLOQUIUM
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PAPER Clonal reproduction in fungi COLLOQUIUM John W. Taylora,1, Christopher Hann-Sodena, Sara Brancoa, Iman Sylvaina, and Christopher E. Ellisonb Departments of aPlant and Microbial Biology and bIntegrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 Edited by John C. Avise, University of California, Irvine, CA, and approved April 2, 2015 (received for review February 17, 2015) Research over the past two decades shows that both recombina- Clearly, mycologists have more work to do with these extremely tion and clonality are likely to contribute to the reproduction of all important fungi. fungi. This view of fungi is different from the historical and still commonly held view that a large fraction of fungi are exclusively Population Genetic Evidence for Recombination clonal and that some fungi have been exclusively clonal for Evidence that clonality was not limited to Glomales but instead hundreds of millions of years. Here, we first will consider how was widespread in fungi came from the oft-cited statistic that these two historical views have changed. Then we will examine 20% of fungi are asexual (12). This fraction represented the the impact on fungal research of the concept of restrained re- number of fungi for which sexual reproduction had not been combination [Tibayrenc M, Ayala FJ (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA observed or was rarely observed. At a time when observation of 109 (48):E3305–E3313]. Using animal and human pathogenic fungi, the sexual morphology of a fungus was required for its classifi- we examine extrinsic restraints on recombination associated with cation, these fungi were classified in the Deuteromycota, apart bottlenecks in genetic variation caused by geographic dispersal from sexual fungi. Two decades later, with DNA providing the and extrinsic restraints caused by shifts in reproductive mode as- variable characters required for phylogenetic classification, all sociated with either disease transmission or hybridization. Using fungi now can be classified in one Kingdom, Fungi, and the species of the model yeast Saccharomyces and the model filamen- Deuteromycota classification has been officially abandoned (13). tous fungus Neurospora, we examine intrinsic restraints on recom- In those two decades, DNA variation also was applied to pop- bination associated with mating systems that range from strictly ulation studies, some of which addressed the reproductive mode clonal at one extreme to fully outbreeding at the other and those of fungi with no observed sexual morphology. Here we present that lie between, including selfing and inbreeding. We also con- two examples of these studies, one with Coccidioides posadasii EVOLUTION sider the effect of nomenclature on perception of reproductive and the other with Aspergillus fumigatus. mode and a means of comparing the relative impact of clonality C. posadasii is known to mycologists and physicians because it and recombination on fungal populations. Last, we consider a re- causes disease in otherwise healthy humans (14). It is limited to cent hypothesis suggesting that fungi thought to have the most hot, dry areas of the Southwestern United States and Mexico and severe intrinsic constraints on recombination actually may have to similar locations in Central and South America, where it is the fewest. adapted to life with desert mammals. The same environments are occupied by its sister species, Coccidioides immitis, which is fungi | reproduction | recombination | clonality | population genomics found in California and northern Mexico. These species make abundant clonal spores, but no one has reported sex in either asily the most famous claim of strict clonality in fungi is the species. The first evidence for recombination in C. immitis, and E“ancient, asexual scandal” of the Glomales (1), home to the the first for any morphologically asexual fungus, came from a fungi that form arbuscular mycorrhizae with the great majority of population study using randomly amplified markers that showed land plants (2). They are the oldest fungi with a solid fossil re- electrophoretic variation that could be confirmed by sequencing. cord, in terms of both fossils of their clonal spores at 460 Ma (3) With only 25 individuals and 14 markers, the null hypothesis and fossils of their association with the underground organs of of recombination could not be rejected, unlike the hypothesis plants at 400 Ma (4). They are massively multinucleate (Fig. 1), for clonality, which could be rejected (15). The discovery of a and no one has ever reported a stage in the life cycle in which recombining population structure was followed by the discovery there is only one nucleus per cell, let alone a single cell with a by two independent groups of intact mating-type genes in the two single nucleus. Nor has anyone reported sexual reproduction in Coccidioides species (16) and the observation that the mating- these fungi. To explain their apparent avoidance of the genome type regions for the two mating types (which are so diverged in fungi that they are termed “idiomorphs” instead of “alleles”) decay that should accompany exclusive clonality (5), nuclei have been in equal proportion over time, as would be expected of within an individual have been hypothesized, based on cytolog- a sexual population (17). Additional evidence for genetic ex- ical investigation, to be genetically different (Fig. 1) and capable change and recombination has come from population genomic of internuclear genetic exchange (6). This interpretation was research. Population genetics had shown that the two Cocci- challenged by comparison of the nuclei of parents and progeny dioides species (18) harbor genetically differentiated populations and by analysis of individual nuclei (7), but the matter remained (19), and this finding stimulated the sequencing individuals from unresolved because of the difficulty of experimenting with five populations in the two species (20). Genome scans for ex- these obligate plant symbionts. Recently, however, the genome ceptional levels of divergence between the two populations sequence of the most famous of these fungi, Rhizophagus intraradices (syn. Glomus intraradices)(8–10), has shown that the genomes are 10-fold larger than previously estimated (11), that This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of there is no evidence for multiple, diverged genomes in an in- Sciences, “In the Light of Evolution IX: Clonal Reproduction: Alternatives to Sex,” held January 9–10, 2015, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies dividual, that genes known to be involved in sexual reproduction of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA. The complete program and video recordings in other fungi are intact in R. intraradices, and that, in some of most presentations are available on the NAS website at www.nasonline.org/ILE_IX_ cases, the number of these genes is expanded. Based on these Clonal_Reproduction. results, one must conclude that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are Author contributions: J.W.T., C.H.-S., S.B., I.S., and C.E.E. wrote the paper. not ancient asexual scandals. However, it still is true that no The authors declare no conflict of interest. one has reported sex in these fungi or observed a stage in the This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. life cycle in which these fungi exist with only a single nucleus. 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: [email protected]. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1503159112 PNAS Early Edition | 1of8 Downloaded by guest on October 2, 2021 Restricted Recombination Tibayrenc and Ayala (28) introduced the very useful concept of restricted recombination. They view the matter from the angle of pervasive clonal reproduction, stating that “...clonality does not mean total absence of recombination, but that it is too rare to break the prevalent pattern of clonal population structure” (28). For fungi, it may be useful to view the matter from the angle of recombination, i.e. that recombination does not mean the total absence of clonality but rather that recombination can be con- Fig. 1. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in the Glomales. (A) All known phases of the life cycle are multinucleate, as shown here in a hypha and chla- strained by extrinsic and intrinsic means to diminish the pattern mydospore. (Scale bar: 10 μm.) Reproduced from ref. 8. (B and C) Alternative of a recombining population structure. No matter the viewpoint, interpretations of how genetic variation is distributed among multiple nuclei it is clear that recombination has been restricted in fungi. Arguably, in arbuscular mycorrhizal Glomales. (B) Heterokaryosis with genetic varia- the fungi most commonly subjected to restraints on recombination tion spread among different nuclei, so that nuclei in a single individual are are plant pathogens. The reproduction of these fungi has been quite different. (C) Homokaryosis with genetic variation present in every nu- reviewed thoroughly (29–33), leading us to focus on animal cleus, so that nuclei are essentially identical. B and C reproduced with per- pathogenic fungi and model fungi. Also notable is a recent mission from ref. 7. reviewontheimpactofgenomicsonthestudyofallaspectsof fungal reproductive biology (34). (Fig. 2) showed that as much as 7% of the genomes of one species Extrinsic Restrictions to Recombination. There are several examples originated from the other species, most plausibly by interspecific of severe restraints to recombination in fungi. Histoplasma hybridization and subsequent